Australia's Reckoning
Between American Steel and Asian Shadows
The trucks roll north under cover of darkness, their cargo of American missiles destined for Darwin and Townsville. In Canberra, politicians speak solemnly of "deterrence" and "regional stability", their voices tinged with the grave certainty of men who have never heard a shot fired in anger. But in the suburbs of Sydney's Chinatown and Victoria's Box Hill, where 1.4 million Chinese Australians make their homes—where grandmothers who survived the Cultural Revolution now watch their grandchildren play cricket on manicured lawns—a different question lingers: Why is Australia prepared to allow its young people to die for an empire in decline?
This is not rhetorical flourish. The strategic calculus being imposed upon us assumes a war with China is inevitable—a premise that collapses under the slightest scrutiny of historical fact. Since 1979, Beijing has launched zero offensive military actions beyond its immediate periphery. Not one. Compare this to Washington's record: 51 documented military operations since 1991 alone, from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia to the catastrophic destruction of Libya. China invests in high-speed rail across Southeast Asia; America maintains 800 military installations across 80 countries. Yet somehow, we've been conditioned to view dredging operations in the South China Sea as more threatening than the nuclear first-strike policies enshrined in the Pentagon's 2022 Strategic Posture Review.
The cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable when viewed through diaspora eyes. Take the Chen family of Eastwood, whose patriarch fled Guangdong on a fishing boat in 1979. Last month, his granddaughter Emily—Dux of Cheltenham Girls' High, fluent in Mandarin and French—was denied an ASIO security clearance for a Defence internship. Meanwhile, the government commits $368 billion to submarines designed to blockade Chinese ports—ports where the Chens still have cousins working the docks. The 2023 Scanlon Report confirms what any Saturday dim sum crowd could tell you: 88.7% of Chinese-Australians report a "strong sense of belonging" here, a higher rate than Anglo-Australians' attachment to Britain. Yet our national security apparatus treats them as potential fifth columnists rather than what they are—living antibodies against the "clash of civilisations" myth.
Beijing's actual defence posture, as outlined in its soporific 2023 White Paper, reads like a bureaucrat's lullaby: "peaceful coexistence", "win-win cooperation", and—most damningly—a nuclear "No First Use" policy maintained without exception since 1964. Contrast this with America's Nuclear Posture Review, which explicitly reserves the right to vaporise Moscow or Beijing on a first strike. The PLA's budget (1.4% of GDP) looks almost quaint next to the Pentagon's (3.49%), despite China having to secure four times America's population. Even the much-hyped "South China Sea militarisation" involves building weather stations and fishing docks on disputed reefs—not, say, invading sovereign nations under false pretences à la Iraq 2003.
Yet in our think tanks and parliamentary committees, this reality is systematically inverted. Paul Keating calls it "strategic autism"—the inability to perceive that Washington's enemy map bears no relation to Australian interests. We are not a small European state needing American protection; we're a continent-sized power at the crossroads of Asia's future. The 2026 census will likely confirm non-European Australians outnumber those of purely British descent, yet our security institutions remain trapped in a Menzian time warp:
The Royal Australian Navy's new Hunter-class frigates—Swedish-designed, British-armed, American-networked—will patrol waters where 60% of our trade passes through Chinese-protected sea lanes. The ADF officer corps remains 86% Anglo-Celtic (2018 Defence Census), while the ranks they command are increasingly Polynesian, Vietnamese, and Lebanese. At the Australian War College, cadets study Clausewitz and Sun Tzu in equal measure—then graduate to find their promotions contingent on alignment with the Pentagon's priorities.
There's an alternative future shimmering on the horizon, if we have the courage to reach for it:
Imagine harnessing Australia's unique ethno-cultural fabric as strategic infrastructure. Picture 10,000 bilingual Chinese-Australian professionals – business leaders, academics, community organisers – forming living bridges across the Taiwan Strait, their cultural fluency preventing misunderstandings before they escalate. Envision Aboriginal elders like Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton chairing Track II diplomacy sessions with ASEAN counterparts, their 60,000 years of continuous civilisation exposing the shallowness of great power posturing.
Visualise Royal Australian Navy chefs preparing halal-certified meals not as token gestures, but as strategic tools to deepen ties with Indonesian counterparts during joint exercises. See Vietnamese-Australian cybersecurity experts monitoring disinformation flows in the Mekong Delta, their dual heritage allowing them to detect nuances invisible to monolingual analysts. Picture Fijian-Australian peacekeepers leading regional stabilisation efforts, their cultural capital opening doors in Melanesia where Western militaries face suspicion.
This isn't multicultural tokenism – it's strategic depth. Where ANZUS offers only the blunt instrument of military deterrence, our civilisational advantages provide something far more powerful: the capacity to prevent conflicts before they begin, to de-escalate tensions through cultural understanding, and to rebuild shattered regions without the baggage of colonial history.
The missiles being installed in Darwin represent 20th-century thinking – the outdated belief that security flows solely from military dominance. But in the Asian Century, true security will come from webs of mutual understanding, from cultural translators who can navigate civilisational divides, and from recognising that our diversity isn't a vulnerability to be managed but a strategic asset we've barely begun to utilise.
The missiles currently being unloaded in Darwin won't make us safer. They make us complicit—tying our fate to an empire that's lost every major war since 1945 (Korea stalemate, Vietnam defeat, Iraq quagmire, Afghanistan collapse) while China lifted 800 million from poverty. If the AUKUS submarines ever arrive—a prospect Hugh White derides as 'a dangerous fantasy, obsolete before it's launched'—they should defend Australian waters, not serve as forward-deployed pawns in America's losing game of geopolitical chess.
History will judge this moment with cruel clarity. The question isn't whether China is a threat—the data screams otherwise. The real question is why Australia fears its own future more than America's failures. Those missiles now pointing north will one day point inward—not physically, but psychologically—forcing us to confront our choice: to remain a colonial relic or emerge as the world's first post-Western power.
The steel is here. The shadows lengthen. And the time for illusions is over.